Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve ever been in Vegas, and because I’m trying to do this on the cheap, I’m staying in a crappy hotel in the low-rent area of Vegas. It’s quite amazing how deeply screwed-up are the poor ‘hoods in this city. It would be banal to point out the obvious ironies — i.e. that there’s a Niagara Falls of cash thundering in the casinos only a few miles away, even as the local crack addicts get into tooth-loosening brawls over who gets the last can of Lysol. But what struck me more is the weird mix of hopefulness and total despair that haunts the streets of decrepit Vegas: Everyone seems balanced between a) striving incredibly hard for some big score just around the corner, and b) just giving the hell up once and for all, with neither a) nor b) dominant.

These are my massive cultural generalizations, of course, and probably have all the accuracy of those of a Victorian anthropologist. But it’s a weird, weird part of town.